Today thousands of blogs were created. Millions of web pages are created everyday. With this wealth of information simply getting it all in your head is a feat unto itself. How then do we streamline data, how do we reduce down time and increase productivity? Easy, we compress it, via websites and programs. Using aggregates allows us to “subscribe” to our favorite websites and compress a days worth of internet surfing into a few hours of condensed reading material.

There is a wealth of aggregators out there and unless you are a blog or Podcast freak you use the default of your internet browser. Both IE and Firefox have built in aggregates so you can easily subscribe to your favorite sites. There are basically two kinds of aggregators, online and offline. When it comes to online aggregators Bloglines take the cake. Not only is Bloglines one of the most favored online aggregators but also one of the few that shows your logo. Look at images below. Don’t you think the information resonates better with the logos included? Even just for personalization you would think every aggregate would include favicons.

But does all this easily accessed information help you? What happens to branding, image and PR when information is syndicated without your oversight? Most aggregators do not display logos or favicons leaving fans disconnected with the information they are receiving. Simply inserting more self promotional content won’t work because readers will stray from your blogs and Podcasts if they do not gain enough from them. The solution is to add some script which will allow readers to pull your favicon along with the feed. And although many feeders do not support this, eventually they will all follow suite. Itunes is the pioneer of this technology and you can see how great it looks below.

For an Atom Feed add the following code to your feed file. Basically keep you image proportional and remember the aggregators will automatically re-size your images, plan for constraint.

The RSS feed is a little more complicated because you can only use an image, however it’s still fairly simple. By looking at the code you can see there are three elements to consider the URL, title and link. The URL refers to the image URL, the link should be the top level domain for your site and the title is the alt attribute. Also make sure to include width, height and descriptions.